Think for a moment: Can you imagine any contemporary fashion, travel, entertainment, or food brand running their business without attractive profiles on social networks, for example? In the modern world, it seems as impossible as squaring the circle, as content marketing is the big cheese of any successful business.
Content Marketing Strategy: Why to Plan
Content marketing, as it is, presents the proven practice of setting up robust relationships with your target group by creating value for customers with engaging content, thus driving more traffic and conversions. So, to meet consumers’ expectations and boost your brand, your company needs a perfectly-designed content marketing strategy, which is pre-planned and calibrated by experts.
SaaS: Make It Fine and Dandy
SaaS content marketing is something beyond trivial ways for customers to learn more about the service you offer. It doesn’t matter whether your company is a firmly-entrenched brand or just a newbie, as the competition for the affinity of your target group is going to be immense.
Digital innovations bring an impressive number of options for all kinds of SaaS buyers. Your potential clients never find themselves short of messaging, mailing, and other ways of informing competing for their attention. Will you manage to reach your target audience and attract a sufficient number of customers to boost the sales of your brand?
Shooting the way for your SaaS to the prospects, mind that to improve your b2b content marketing strategy, you should resort to the best practices tested and verified by modern experts worldwide. The most valid tips to reinforce your content marketing strategy for SaaS are set out below.
Twenty-Four-Seven Tips
1. Establish Strategic Objectives
Strategic goals definition plays a crucial role in your content optimization to achieve your marketing strategy objectives. Any goal defined as strategic means neither certain parameters nor specific figures. It reveals and clearly outlines what functions your SaaS content marketing will have in your business structure and sales processes. To give you a flavor of this, let’s run through some examples of strategic objectives of content marketing strategy:
- Build a strong, two-way relationship with your target audience;
- Boost your SaaS brand appreciation among the leads;
- Embolden your brand support and client loyalty.
Besides, it goes without saying that to set relevant marketing goals, you should come from data-driven business decisions, so the next tip of great importance is the marketing metrics that you are going to track.
2. Define Marketing Metrics
Metrics is a potent tool for strategic decision-making, so the time has come to consider the minimum number of metrics required by content marketing for SaaS:
- Visits per dollar spent. This parameter has much to say about how each dollar invested increases the number of leads that you have access to;
- New guests vs returning visitors. The high relative value of new guests normally coincides with the traffic inflow, whereas the high percentage of returning visitors shows loyalty and support for your brand;
- Average visitor lifetime value. This metric reveals how much each visitor spends on your brand on average. It offers illustrative insights into your customers’ longevity, keyword choices, and sales funnel, which contributes to your brand identity.
3. Make a SaaS Sales Funnel
Taking a journey from prospects to customers, your clients go through your SaaS sales funnel facing various difficulties and pitfalls. The best way to understand those pains and needs of your audience is to go along the path of your customers’ journey yourself to experience each of the steps your clients take:
- Getting informed about your product, service, and/or brand;
- Visiting your site;
- Drumming interest in your brand up (free trial/demo/plan request);
- Ascending to a deep-routed customer (free/paying);
- Broadening of your service functionality use;
- Renewing of subscription or license.
You can also get funnel ideas by reverse engineering your competitors’ sales funnels. To do this, you simply need to identify your competitors who are marketing to a similar audience, then review their ads and landing pages.
In SaaS marketing, the pivotal point of any customer’s journey is the initial contact with your service or brand. It is here where your principal task is to stop your prospects from going to your competitors.
4. Check Out Competitors
Now, carry out a thorough analysis of competing brands’ backlinks to find out where they are mentioned. Explore your competitors’ SaaS blogs, resources and content for keywords, topics, subjects, and platforms they target, and then apply these findings in your analysis to find out what your competitor’s content marketing strategy looks like. This is how you can see the gaps to overcome in your own marketing strategy.
5. Tease Out Your Audience
For sure, it will be a cold day in hell before you can directly settle your brand on every possible platform. Still, you should find out those your target audience is interested in.
Besides, it is pretty helpful to know what questions your prospectives ask in forums and what burning issues and technical pains your potential clients face. Checklist creating may also come in handy to categorize the basic characteristics of your target audience according to the criteria like:
- Age and gender;
- Professional field, title, and income level;
- Brands, websites, and social media followed.
6. Boost Your Keyword Strategy
Having defined relevant keywords at each stage of your customer’s journey, you can correctly adjust your content to meet the requests of the clients. To improve your keyword strategy, you’ll need to learn more about Saas SEO strategies like the ones in this Pearl Lemon SEO guide. To promote your content effectively, it’s recommended to carry out thorough keyword research and employ various powerful SEO and link building services.
For example, if you’re in the field services industry and are targeting handyman business owners, you might create content targeting the keyword “handyman salary.” As we can see in this handyman salary guide, this keyword shows up multiple times throughout the guide, including the title, H1s, and more.
7. Make Them Get Hype
Remember that you can’t direct all your marketing activity to the introduction of your service and then tone it down at the next stages. Catch people’s attention from the first moment and keep them thrilled throughout the piece, building hype around your brand. Using your marketing tools effectively, you can turn a neutral consumer into a hyped-up lead, thus improving your lead conversion over time.
Make sure to demonstrate all your expertise in content marketing when you build your professional resume for job application. The contents of your resume should be easily readable and perfectly laid out, to further show your skills in creating good content!
8. Leverage User-Generated Content
You might think that user-generated content is only for B2C retailers. But it’s an effective strategy for SaaS marketers as well. It adds social proof to your strategy.
One of the best UGC tactics for a SaaS company is customer testimonials and reviews. Most people check out other people’s experiences with a brand before making a purchase decision. When you showcase the stories of your real happy customers, you build trust and credibility for your brand.
Collecting testimonials is easy, and you can largely automate the process with a right testimonial tool. Check out for example this automatic and authentic testimonial generator.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, by following these simple tips, you’ll manage to optimize your SaaS content marketing, making it an awesome way to promote your brand in the extremely competitive modern digital world. By building up the optimal strategy and relevant content, your company will succeed in shifting to a new level and boosting sales in two shakes.
